Books in Brief: Fiction

By Anderson Tepper

Published: December 27, 1998

BEYOND THE LIMBO SILENCE

By Elizabeth Nunez.

Seal Press, cloth, $24; paper, $12.95.

When she leaves her native Trinidad on a scholarship to the College of the Sacred Heart for Women in Oshkosh, Wis. (a town that ''had no Negroes, so it had no Negro problem''), Sara Edgehill, the fragile protagonist of Elizabeth Nunez's second novel, has apprehensions about America. Her ambivalence is echoed by her grandmother: ''Listen to me. America is like the sea. You think it's good. You think you can swim in it and you'll be safe. . . . But when you're not looking, not thinking about it, America can drown you like the sea.'' Indeed, in this year of 1963, the civil rights struggle in the South is revealing America's ugliest undercurrents. When Sara becomes involved with Sam Maxwell, a black law student and political activist from Milwaukee, racial awareness and painful family truths bubble to the surface -- most notably the lynching of a great-uncle who immigrated to America years earlier and the tragedy of Sara's white great-grandmother, who was institutionalized after falling in love with an African obeah man, or voodoo priest, in Trinidad. Sara's own mental balance is further threatened as Sam becomes embroiled in events in Mississippi, especially after the disappearance of his colleagues, the real-life Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. Eventually, Sara succumbs to the sea of emotions, both personal and racial, that engulfs her during her first year in this cold and colorless land -- even as the novel sinks under the weight of an interior language of ancestral mysticism. Anderson Tepper